'Stan Against Evil' Showrunner Dana Gould Explains How Tonight's 'X-Files' Homage Happened

In the second of two back-to-back episodes of Stan Against Evil to air tonight, the town of Willard's Mill got a visit from a pair of black-glad agents of a shadowy government agency. The pretty redhead was very skeptical of...basically everything, while her male partner wanted to believe...well, pretty much everything.

Of course, this is Stan Against Evil, and Stan doesn't want to believe. So it was a hilarious fit. But...how did they decide to go full-on X-Files?

"I feel the structure of our show and the nature of our show is very close to The X-Files," executive producer Dana Gould told ComicBook.com. "We have stand-alones, we have monster of the week, and we have mythology episodes. The relationship of John and Janet is very Mulder and Scully. The original concept in my head was what if instead of being partnered with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson was partnered with my dad, but it was still the show and they had to do it? You still have to go along and solve this mystery with this character who's in the middle of the show and doesn't belong there."

"The reason we ended up doing this episode is that Valerie Tosi who plays Agent Nesbitt is a really good friend of mine and is the biggest X-Files fan I know," Gould said. "I was having lunch with Jessica Conrad, who is one of our writers, and is also a giant X-Files fan, and I said, you really have to meet my friend Valerie. She's as big an X-Files fan as you are and she looks like Gillian Anderson. And she said, we should have Mulder and Scully come to Willard's Mill,' just as a joke, and I was like, 'Actually, I think we could do that. We'd just have to call them something else.' And we basically, just sitting there at lunch, beat out the episode — and then I added Kolchak later, my own obsession with Carl Kolchak."

That obsession worked out, though, and ultimately the character got expanded during production.

"The last beat of Kolchak wasn't even in the script, but Rob Cohen and I thought that the actor who played him did such a great job that we were like, 'we've got to extend this, we've got to do this more,'" Gould added.

Stan Against Evil airs on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on IFC.